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Bricks are cooked clay. Venice substrate is wet clay.

• supermatt 3y ago
  I don’t think that required clarification, but yes that is almost correct, in the sense that bricks don’t need to be cooked (the term used is “fired”) as they can also be left to dry naturally.
  • jaclaz 3y ago
    Sure, though the fired ones are much more resistant than naturally dried ones. The note was more about the fact that clay in different states (wet/fired/dried) has very different properties and that the parent comment was ignoring that. BTW the way a foundation may work (wooden piles in a wet clay substrate) is very different from how a vertical structure (pillar/wall) or a horizontal one (beam/deck/slab) behaves. In the case of the foundation, the wooden piles distribute the vertical forces through lateral adherence (as opposed to applying it directly to the top surface) over all the inserted length, and in the particular case of the tight grid used in old Venice buildings, the wooden poles act also as containment, they are also called "friction piles".